Gangster No 1
This one sadly didn’t land with me which is a shame because it’s another movie with Paul Bettany playing an absolute blinder. I honestly would watch that man act out my own mother’s brutal murder. The problem really with the movie is in its whole conception – Bettany plays a brutal, vicious London mobster during the 60s. Malcolm McDowell plays the same character in the 2000s. But they just don’t cohere at all. You never feel like they’re both actually the same person, even taking into account the years separating them. Bettany is lithe, sinister and intermittently filled with a kind of dazzling, situational charm. McDowell is a ranting old man way too fond of calling people the C word. He has none of Bettany’s charisma, coming across instead like a Poundland Michael Caine. Stylistically, tonally, aesthetically – it’s hard to reconcile the two completely contrary depictions of the main character.
So, when you’re waiting for Bettany to say something chilling in a scene, it’s jarring and upsetting to hear Malcolm McDowell narrate the action in voiceover. ‘I’m walking down the corridor. I’m pressing the button for the lift’. God, I know – I can see it. It’s unnecessary and undercuts the tension of what’s happening.
And that’s frustrating because Paul Bettany is so good at the physical embodiment of the character. His silences are deafening. His gestures are understated and yet filled with menace. His rare smiles are alarming for their out-of-context brightness. But it’s still Malcolm God-Damn McDowell that is explaining what’s happening like he’s doing close-captioning for the visually impaired. There are way too many actors playing this part, and McDowell is the one that should go. They could have saved themselves a salary and ended up with what would undoubtedly be a career-defining breakout role for their real star.
(For the record, I have nothing against McDowell generally. He’s just bad in this)
It’s an especial shame too because the film also stars a young Remus Lupin (David Thewlis) playing a laconic crime kingpin and every time he and Bettany are in a scene it’s a battle to the end to see who steals it. And when the action shifts to the (near) present day and Malcom McDowell takes over the reins of the character… all of that electricity is gone. The dangerous, unsettling sociopathic mobster disappears only to be replaced by a rambling Grandpa Simpson waving a gun around.
A missed opportunity here.
Get Out
Speaking of films that are much greater than the sum of their parts – there’s Get Out. I talked a bit about Us in a previous post, pointing out that I didn’t really get the political allegorical elements that everyone else raved about. It turns out that it’s a ‘can’t see the wood for the trees’ situation. Jordan Peele, it transpires, just doesn’t do subtlety or nuance and that just so happens to hit the sweet spot of capability for modern cultural criticism. His social commentary has all the intricacy of a sledgehammer. It’s all surface level, and if you look for it at the deeper connections between story, character and aesthetic then you won’t find it. Nobody is going to have their mind expanded by this movie when it comes to its portrayals of race in America because it’s not interested in engaging in dialog. It ties you to a chair and shouts right in your face as if it thinks you’re too stupid to understand otherwise. It’s like being waterboarded with wokeness.
That’s a pretty odious way to treat your audience, I think, but it’s pretty much the only flaw in Get Out because wall-to-wall it is otherwise an absolute treat. It’s genuinely suspenseful in the way it introduces the weird, unsettling environment in which the story is told. It leads you into thinking that things are one way, only to reveal that they were actually much worse than you may have initially thought. It successfully builds a narrative structure that is simple enough that you think you have a handle on its shape before it actually breaks apart like one of those optical illusions you’d find in a museum. And, to its credit, it also knows when to ramp up the tension and when to throw in a joke.
I just wish that it was made by someone that had more respect for their viewers. There’s nothing wrong with a narrative signpost when it’s warranted but Get Out is the equivalent of Google Maps played at double speed. ‘IN TEN METRES WE WILL SEE A RACIST SIDE-EYE. IN TWENTY METERS YOU WILL BE REMINDED OF WHITE COMPLICITY. IN FIFTY METERS YOU’LL BE CONVINCED EVERYONE HERE IS A MONSTER’. It’s a movie that looks to Twitter for its philosophy of messaging, but tweets aren’t an effective mechanism to drive home an argument that can change anyone’s mind. It’s all designed to get appreciative hand-clappy retweets from a suitably pious echo chamber. That’s Get Out in a nutshell and that’s a massive waste of an opportunity. Get Out doesn’t really have anything new to say, but it’ll shout it at great volume into your face anyway.
Gone Girl
Mrs Meeple tells me the book is much better, because it takes more time to lay the necessary psychological groundwork. I can believe that, because in its movie adaptation it is consistently baffling. It’s like someone decided the theme of the film should be ‘extreme overreaction’ and then decided that motivating the actions of the characters was an unnecessary distraction. Suffice to say it doesn’t cohere well when the main overriding response you have to every narrative escalation is ‘Wait, why is that happening?’
Coupled to this, there are too many movies in this movie. There are at least three complete films in here, and every time it got to what seemed like an interesting and compelling place to stop there was another goddamn movie to follow. It’s Too Many Cooks but without the incisive self-awareness. Imagine if a movie was comprised entirely of Return of the King epilogues. That’s Gone Girl. And then, ironically, it ends before it’s ready. The first time it happened I thought ‘Oh, huh – that’s quite a twist. Yeah, okay that sort of worked and was sort of enjoyable.’. I just wasn’t pleased to pause the movie and find it still had another ninety minutes to go.
The thing is though – it’s not a bad movie. Or a bad package of three movies. It’s from David Fincher so you know it’s immaculately directed. It’s just that watching it feels a bit like someone is skipping forward in 30s intervals, exactly at the time the exposition should be there. There some decent performance, some tense moments, and some effective sections of dark comedy. I just found myself too unmoored from the characters to get a grounding in their internal lives.
Grease
We watched Grease. It’s still great. I know it gets a bad rap from modern audiences for its ending. ‘What’s the lesson here? That women have to change for men?’, but I think that misses the entire point of the movie. Sure, Sandy became a leather-clad hottie grinding her ass in Zuko’s face. But what people forget is that he stayed with the sports program he joined to gain her affection. He graduated high school because of a desire to impress her – he didn’t abandon it when he’d achieved the goal of making a connection and he shows that by arriving to the celebrations clad in his Letterman sweater.
The message of Grease, for me, isn’t that Sandy changed for Danny. They changed for each other, and for the better. She was uptight. He was sleazy. They became better, more comfortable versions of themselves and I think that’s actually a pretty wholesome message.
Of course, I also think that Kinnicky died on Thunder Road and the entire last five minutes of the movie is his brain’s fever dream as he descends into the abyss. So maybe I’m not the best source of analysis as far as this movie goes.
Happiest Season
I picked this one out of the list of unwatched movies mainly on the basis of an absolutely stellar cast. Not so much the main characters, but lurking in the cast list are names like Aubrey Plaza, Alison Brie, Victor Garber and Mary Steenburgen. And while I didn’t like it for much of the time was sitting with it, by the end it had mostly won me around as a worthy way to spend my time.
The ‘first impression’ problem is twofold.
- It’s a Christmas-themed romcom and despite its lesbian protagonists it stills feels as dated as one of National Lampoon’s Chevy Chase movies.
- One of the main characters is utterly hate worthy.
I don’t mind movies with a toxic protagonist, provided that it’s intentional. Whiplash is phenomenal because JK Simmons steals every scene he’s in. Nightcrawler is mesmerising despite the sociopathic dysfunction of its main character. But here, the main character is terrible in a completely unrelatable way. She’s just a complete bitch to her girlfriend. Sure, she’s closeted and fears that her family won’t accept her relationship… but even in the quiet, private moments she takes every opportunity to diminish her obviously miserable and desperately lonely partner. And while that’s the engine of the ‘comedy of errors’ formula – it feels really unpleasant here. It feels like you’re watching an abusive relationship, complete with gaslighting.
But towards the end of the movie there’s a scene where the ‘gay best friend’ gives a speech about coming out and how different it is when someone feels like they’re going to be accepted versus when someone feels otherwise. And it casts the entire movie in a different light in a way that makes the whole thing feel like something more transformative than ‘Christmas comedy but with gays’. You can recontextualise everything that happens as a desperate social mask in the face of unbearable familial pressures. It’s weird because it’s the kind of thing I expect in a film that is obviously ‘better’ than Happiest Season presents itself. And I think tonally the whole movie is badly structured because you’re never really prepared for the revelation that (might) redeem the main character you spend most of its runtime hating. And after the denouement it drifts into a kind of saccharine over-correction that comes across as glib and insincere.
I would recommend Happiest Season though now that I’ve told you ‘there’s a bit more to this than you might think’ but I’d completely understand if you bailed out half way through.
Hard Candy
Hard Candy is also a difficult film to watch, but for different reasons. It’s hard to talk about it without spoiling the big reveal that happens fifteen or so minutes in, so maybe skip on to the next part of the post if you don’t want this indie darling from 2005 being ruined for you. It’s a film that I think is worth your attention so I don’t want to just spoil it.
It stars Ellen Page, who at seventeen looks every inch the quintessential fourteen year old. A flirtatious online conversation with an older man results in them meeting up, him taking her back to his house, and then her absolutely hollowing his life out. It’s great to see a thriller of this nature when it’s the confident, suave man that’s being utterly destroyed by a cold, remorseless teenager. The two main performances of this tightly shot, claustrophobic horror story are excellent. Page comes across as genuinely terrifying – a kind of incarnated spirit of vengeance for all abused children. She seems so fragile in the beginning – a naive, waif-like elf being seduced into a position of vulnerability. And yeah, she’s definitely elf-like – but only if our frame of reference is the terrifying faeries of the Scottish Unseelie Court. The weird thing is that tied up in all this vindictive sociopathic vigilantism is an oddly amiable and affable performance. Even at her most chilling remorseless she gives off waves of likeable dorkiness. It’s a hard act to balance.
Patrick Wilson in comparison begins as an oily seductor, knowingly oozing his way through a very careful and polished process of manipulation as he skilfully (he thinks) grooms Page into increasingly compromising circumstances. You can tell he’s done it before – every step of the process is so technically proficient and well rehearsed. The entire story is so obviously driven forward by his actions until it becomes blatantly clear he was never responsible for the pacing of any of it. His performance too is excellent, the whole thing pivoting on a brief moment in his eyes when he first realises that the predator has become helpless prey – that his predicament isn’t foreplay but rather a more sinister kind of preparation for things to come.
Unfortunately all of this peters out a little as the movie reaches its crescendo, becoming less about this fascinating character-driven psychodrama and more dependent on standard thriller tropes. The ending… meh. I could take it or leave it. More than anything else, it lacks the authenticity of purpose that characterises everything that precedes it. It’s not bad, it just lacks the tautness of what came before.
It’s a provocative film – genuinely unpleasant to watch at times – but worth your time.
Hypernormalization
With that little bit of negativity out of the way, let’s talk about Adam Curtis and why I think he absolutely would (and should) survive the metaphorical burning of culture I outlined above. I watched the documentary Hypernormalization, which is one of his, and I think he is one of the most authentically insightful film-markers out there. And I think that because he’s about as ‘long form’ a documentary filmmaker as you can get. There’s nothing about his work that is flashy or likely to become especially memetic. His work is deep, complex and deconstructive in a way that needs your full attention.
I’ve been watching quite a lot of his films recently, but they are all basically the same. I don’t mean that in a bad way, but rather there is a coherent, reliable thesis at the core of everything he does and it is comprehensively and scholarly examined in a way that leads to conclusions that – while not irrefutable – are certainly well argued.
Hypernormalization is a great example really of his work. It makes the argument that technology has rendered the complexity of reality down to a shallow simulation of it, and that’s been so successful that in the end we’ve all come to believe in the abstraction. And the ‘fake world’ that we live within has had the unfortunate and unexpected side-effect of forcing us all to participate in maintaining the fiction because we’re no longer able to really envision what the alternative is. And thus, we take that which is fake and make it normal, because it no longer matters what reality is when everyone is participating in the fiction.
The documentary is almost three hours long, so don’t expect me to be able to pack all its observations into a paragraph.
The thing I love about this is that Curtis obviously believes the same things I do – that his viewers are intelligent, thoughtful people and that it’s safe to respect their intelligence in the construction of an analysis. He doesn’t believe in aiming his work at the vocabulary of the average Sun reader. Of the many criticisms my work has received online, the one that annoys me most is that I need to talk down more to people that read it. That using the vocabulary of an adult is in some way ‘showing off’.
But also, Curtis believes – as I do – that it’s important to relate things together in a way that may involve assumptions of knowledge. That you can’t talk as if everyone that sees your work is a tabula rasa, bereft of their own scholarship. He trusts that when encountering unfamiliar words or concepts that an intelligent viewer will either work it out from context or read up about it.
Seriously, Adam Curtis is a gem in the documentary film industry and I think you should check him out.
Interview with the Vampire
I remember this got critically panned at the time. ‘Tom Cruise is a terrible Lestat’, ‘Brad Pitt has no business being Louis’. ‘Antonio Banderas does not make a convincing human, much less a vampire’. ‘Overwrought and melodramatic’, etc, etc. I actually recall it being received in much the same was as people received Twilight, and I think for similar reasons… It’s Not Okay for Serious Men to like movies made from books written for teen girls, and that was kind of the Anne Rice aesthetic. Especially, in the early 90s, a lot of men wouldn’t admit to liking a movie that is So Gay. And it really is. The homoeroticism is off the charts. So many lingering, hungry looks and sexually charged sucking. Of wrists and necks and more. I think that really hurt its reception in certain fragile demographics.
Not with me though. I loved it at the time, and it turns out I still love it. I think it holds up really well. Sure, a few of the performances strike the occasional wooden note and the themes that underpin a lot of it are deeply unpleasant. Yes, Anne Rice’s dialog often has all the realism of Bugs Bunny painting a train tunnel on a solid cliff-face. And it is so lacking in self-awareness that it is borderline pathologic. But for all that – it’s an earnest movie that has a lot of spirit. It looks great, is dripping with intense angst, and it manages to inject a touch of humanity into a fundamentally inhuman premise.
Still a great movie.
Into the Spiderverse
This is a little gem of a movie. My (mild) arachnophobia makes Spiderman my least favourite Marvel superhero through largely no fault of his own. As such he’s the character I’m probably least familiar with in terms of how he interacts with the wider cinematic universe. Or even the comic universe. I’m not really a comics guy – it’s an area of nerd fandom I have always considered alien territory. The honest truth is that I find it hard to parse the grammar of a comic book. When I have persisted (such as with Watchmen and V for Vendetta) it was because they were stand-alone explorations that didn’t need me to have fifty years of historical context in the back of my mind.
So yeah, while I enjoy Marvel movies it’s only on a very surface level. Everyone raved about this at the time though so it’s been on my ‘to watch’ list for quite a while. Indeed, it’s one of the few that survived the various purges that you may have seen in the Depth Year Diaries (all of which will be available to all patrons by tomorrow!). I wasn’t exactly enthused though.
But yeah, everyone is right. It’s wonderful. The story may not be especially innovative but there is genius in the way they blend character, characterization, and genuinely goofy comedy. The artwork (for this is animation) is astonishing. I think you could pause it at any point and make a decent wallpaper image for your desktop. There’s a youtube series I loved (sadly terminated) called Every Frame a Painting and I couldn’t help thinking of it repeatedly through the runtime of Into the Spiderverse. Every frame genuinely is a painting, and that extraordinary attention to the consistency and detail of the aesthetic is reflected in the story and the script.
Thoroughly recommended, y’all.
K-19: Widowmaker
Kathryn Bigelow makes some of the tensest movies out there, and K-19: Widowmaker is certainly one of the better ones. A Russian submarine – a cold-war nuclear marvel – experiences difficulties on its shakedown tour. A combination of commander arrogance, expert inexperience, and cold war paranoia all come together to put the crew in the direst scenario that can be imagined aboard a machine of its class… a runaway reaction within the reactor core.
It’s a great movie – well written with a stellar cast and a tightly plotted narrative. It’s cinematically claustrophobic, with the whole thing being as much a character study as a straight up thriller. And what makes it even more remarkable is that it’s based, roughly, on a true story. Working in tightly timed shifts, the crew sacrifice themselves to make repairs to the radiation flooded submarine full in the knowledge that they are giving their lives to do it.
Really good stuff, worth checking out… although perhaps the situation in Ukraine might texture the way you might feel about it. I watched it before any of that stuff happened. Nowadays it might come across as an unpleasant piece of Russian propaganda even if that was absolutely not the intention.
Kingsman: The Golden Circle
The original Kingsman was a surprise hit for me – I was expecting it to be rubbish and it wasn’t. It was funny, stylish, and with a kinetic energy that led to some of the most astounding action sequences I’ve seen in a movie. The sequel has… none of those elements. It’s hard to say what the problem is really because its constituent parts are fine. They come together… fine. They tell a story that is… fine.
Actually, that’s the problem right there, isn’t it? The original Kingsman was so much greater than the sum of its parts, coming together in a way that took a workaday premise and threw it through the cinematic equivalent of a pinball machine’s multiplier. It sparkled in a way that was great because it was so unexpected. You go in expecting a James Bond knockoff and get something that is so much greater than it has any right to be. It was like Gordon Ramsay going into your kitchen and knocking up a three star meal using nothing more than the ingredients with which you have historically failed to make an omelette.
But the thing is, once you’ve had your standards raised like that you start to expect it. So now the perfectly competent omelette with which you would have previously been overjoyed just tastes a bit… bland. Filling, sure. As designed, definitely. But nothing more. It’s not bad. It’s just bad in comparison.
Labyrinth
I still love Labyrinth. I will always love Labyrinth. When people ask me what my favourite David Bowie album is (I’m old enough for that to be a non-zero probability occurrence) I will say Hunky Dory. But only because I’m too embarrassed to admit ‘It’s the Labyrinth soundtrack’. This was my absolute favourite movie when I was very young and the starting notes of the introductory song will never not move me. Like the first strident chords of a Star Wars scroll, I’m now developmentally wired to find joy in the sound.
It pains me then to say that I think I have finally reached the conclusion ‘it hasn’t aged all that well’. I’ve probably been in denial about that for some time, because I watch this film more than you’d think.
In comparison to something like the Princess Bride, which is always a great way to spend an evening, Labyrinth is quite clunky. It’s got more imagination, more style, more innovation. And it’s got a whole lot of heart. But… the dialog is pretty bad, the characters pretty one dimensional, and the story seems a bit like it’s been carved out of a much larger, much more nuanced piece of stone. It’s just easy to overlook all of that because of all the strengths of the production. Labyrinth is made up of occasionally wonderful set-pieces that are strung together in a haphazard way. When you’re in the moment, you overlook the nonsense. When you’re not, it’s really jarring.
But I will never not feel myself opening up to sheer happiness when I hear David Bowie sing, ‘It’s only forever. It’s not long at all’.
Maybe at this point it’s just the exhausted cynicism of middle age, combined with the fact I have watched this movie many, many times. Maybe I’ve just wrung the last drop of juice out of it and now there’s no new refreshment to be found. Perhaps the wrong frame of reference is ‘how well did I enjoy it this time’ versus ‘how many times did I enjoy the hell out of it?’. By that metric, there’s a strong argument to be made that Labyrinth is one of the greatest movies ever made. And I still wish the goblins would come and take me away. Right now.
Let the Right One In
Let The Right One In is a peculiarly Swedish take on the idea of a vampire horror movie. A young boy, bullied by his fellow students, befriends an oddball fellow child by the name of Eli. Eli, you will be startled to find out, is a vampire. And Eli is currently being ‘looked after’ by someone that must be the stupidest familiar in all of undead media. His activities either a mark of phenomenal incompetence or a sign of dubious production values in filming. I don’t feel ‘exsanguinating a corpse in full view of a main road’, or ‘Draining a body in the locker room of a school mere minutes after everyone has been let out’ merit much in the way of professional plaudits.
Anyway, Eli isn’t a monster. Eli just needs to feed, and Oskar (the other child) finds himself drawn to Eli. They become friends, and more, and then they need to part right up until the point that they don’t.
It’s an interesting deep-dive into territory that has only really been covered in movies by the character Claudia in Interview with the Vampire. And it’s more of a character study than a straight up monster movie. More than that though, it’s a character study in the cold, brittle and unforgiving environs of a Swedish winter in the slums of Stockholm during the 80s. The scenery is as bleak as the prospects of many of the participants in the story. I resonated with the setting, but only because it mirrored somewhat the reality of living in a Scottish scheme during the 80s.
It’s good, and worth your attention.